The Undoing, Succession, Billions: Some Highly Subjective Opinions
Spot the fictional media mogul.
Friends, please brace yourselves for some extremely (and I mean extremely) digressive, frivolous, subjective musings about the above-mentioned TV shows. This may cause you to wonder, Does Anna really spend this much time thinking about these things?, and I’m sorry to say that the answer is yes. Christmas is coming, the pandemic rages on, and I have the urge to indulge myself in something completely light-hearted. As Taylor Swift would say, ’tis the damn season.
Also, I’d been wanting to write up these thoughts for a while now, and then on Sunday afternoon, while having brunch outside with a friend in Brooklyn, we spotted Logan Roy himself at the same restaurant (eating indoors, right on the eve of the indoor ban: a classic death-defying Roy move!), and this must be my sign from the universe that it’s finally time to take action.
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Like a whole bunch of people, Andrew and I got totally sucked into The Undoing. I liked the whodunit aspect, the red herrings and shifting suspicions, the creepy sense of foreboding. But more than that, I loved the little anthropological moments, the pitch-perfect capture of certain kinds of people who dwell on the Upper East Side. And yes, I recognize that the thrill I feel in seeing Grace walk past the Kiehl’s at the corner of 64th and Lex is not a universally shared thrill; it signifies something to me because I’ve walked past that corner a million times myself. But I appreciate TV shows that go to the effort of getting the locations right, of anchoring characters in highly specific and highly plausible locations: gala fundraisers at the top of the Time Warner building, clandestine coffee dates at Madison Avenue diners. If the script is the text, choices like costume and location are the subtext, and when they’re done right, they add a dimension of delicious complexity. For instance, the dynamic between Grace and the doormen in her father’s Fifth Avenue apartment building: it’s spot on, and so is the fact that adult Grace now chooses to live in a townhouse, trading that fancy lobby and those Central Park views for a home that is more eclectic and, quite literally, more down-to-earth (though undoubtedly no less expensive).
Sylvia might have been my favorite character in the show—I kind of want a Sylvia spin-off?—which is probably due to two factors. One, Lily Rabe is an excellent actress. Two, Sylvia doesn’t have to carry the heavy plot-burdens of characters like Grace, Jonathan, Henry or Franklin. The script gives her more room for those mundane, low-stakes moments that feel like real life. Like the scene when Sylvia’s working late one night, and her daughter’s there, waiting for Mom to finish up. The glassy high-rise office building; the nighttime sprawl of Manhattan through the window; the containers of take-out on the desk; the teenager in her plaid kilt, hanging out and doing homework. Yes, I thought. Yes, this feels so true, this is exactly the kind of thing that would happen in real life.
I found The Undoing so enjoyable to watch because it helped, in a small and incomplete way, to fill the void that exists in my life between seasons of Succession. These prestige TV shows are home to a recognizable sliver of the Manhattan elite, the people marked by ambitious appetites and sociopathic inclinations (don’t those always seem to go hand-in-hand?). For a while, I thought you could slot Billions into this category, too. But now my mind has changed, and I see Billions as entirely different beast from the other two shows. Even though, at first blush, they seem to have a lot in common. And maybe only a hairsplitter would insist on such fine-grained differentiation. But I am here to split hairs!
Don’t get me wrong: Billions is a lot of fun. Especially the early seasons, when the Axe-versus-Chuck rivalry hasn’t yet become repetitive. The acting is good, the pace is snappy, and I always appreciate a good finance storyline. It’s entertaining! But certain things started to irk me. First were the constant name-dropping cameos. Bobby Axelrod, summoning yet another trendy chef to cook for him at his apartment, slapping him on the back and thanking him, clearly enunciating his name for the benefit of the audience: it bothered me because it felt like a lazy way of signaling What Kind of Guy Bobby Axelrod is. Second irk-factor were the wardrobe choices. I kept fixating on the clothes worn by Lara, Bobby’s wife. I just didn’t believe this was how the wife of a billionaire would dress, even if (especially is) she grew up in more modest circumstances.
It was a wardrobe issue that ultimately proved to be my tipping point, that caused me to begin my emotional divestment from the show. There’s a scene where Chuck Rhoades Senior is getting ready to attend a fancy black tie gala. He’s at his apartment, dressed in his tuxedo. He’s wearing a jacket, a ruffled shirt, a bow tie—okay, fine, looks good—but then we zoom out and there’s … what’s that, holding up his pants? …. a belt? A plain old, basic-ass belt? No. No! No way would Chuck Senior wear a regular old belt with a tuxedo. He would know to wear suspenders or a cummerbund. So how did this happen? Either the character himself made the deliberately off-piste decision to wear a belt with a tux, or the people making the show overlooked this detail. I just didn’t buy the former (Chuck Senior, traditionalist that he is, wouldn’t go off-piste like that!), so it had to be the latter.
It’s an incredibly tiny detail. (I feel ridiculous even typing this up!) But it caused me to understand something. I had mistaken Billions as being a show like Succession; a show for which finance is a mere vehicle for other questions; a show with a fundamentally anthropological focus on the moneyed elite, with an Edith Wharton-like interest in the farces and tragedies of these lives. Not so. Instead, Billions is much more interested in finance qua finance. The anthropology of the elite is incidental, rather than central. Fair enough! But not exactly what I was craving.
Succession, on the other hand. Oh, Succession! Be still my heart. If I were a billionaire on the scale of Logan Roy, I would use my money to pay the writers/producers/cast/crew of the show to just keep making infinite seasons. What makes it so good? I could point to any number of things. The heavyweight cast (don’t ask me to pick a favorite actor, I can’t); the scorchingly funny writing; the spare-no-expenses locations; the way the script is structured by big set-piece scenes (weddings, board meetings, corporate retreats); the gorgeous Nicholas Brittell score. And to those obviously crucial factors, I would also add the show’s attention to aesthetic detail, especially when it comes to clothing.
I loved this piece by Rachel Syme last year: “Let’s Talk About the Clothes on Succession.” It’s such a smart take. Because sometimes an outfit isn’t just an outfit; sometimes it’s, as she writes, a “devastatingly accurate” summation of who a character is: of how they see themselves, of what they wish to highlight, of what they desire to conceal. This kind of attention to detail is painstaking and time-consuming (not to mention expensive; gotta love those HBO dollars!). It takes a lot of work, and the work shows through. I mean this in a good way. I love and am deeply interested in Succession because of how much the show itself evinces love and deep interest in the characters that populate its ranks. This, to me, is the ultimate miracle of the show. The Roy family is a bunch of sociopaths. Would I want to actually be friends with any of them? No! They would be shitty friends! But the show has managed to build a bridge across that divide of dislikability; it has allowed me to understand the pain and trauma and insecurity that cause the Roys to behave as they do, which doesn’t excuse the behavior, but which illuminates the behavior nonetheless. I don’t have to think a person is good in order to find them interesting. If a person is real, that’s enough to make them interesting.
But they do need to be real, or at least, if we’re talking about TV, they need to convince me they’re real. When we were at brunch on Sunday, and I spotted the man in the window, at first I didn’t say anything. He merely registered as someone familiar-looking, vaguely like the father of a friend. I know that guy, I thought. Then went back to my shakshuka. It wasn’t until we were finishing our meal that I realized: Oh, wait a second, that’s who that is. “It’s Logan Roy!” I exclaimed. I didn’t even think to refer to him as Brian Cox. That guy, sitting in the window, could only be Logan Roy.